The rose diagram shows only the swells directed at Bar Beach that coincided with light winds or offshore conditions over a normal December and is based upon 2457 predictions, one every 3 hours. The direction of the spokes show where quality surf generating swell comes from. Five colours show increasing wave sizes. The smallest swells, less than 0.5m (1.5 feet), high are coloured blue. Green and yellow show increasing swell sizes and red represents the biggest swells, greater than >3m (>10ft). In both graphs, the area of any colour is proportional to how commonly that size swell happens.

The diagram implies that the most common swell direction, shown by the largest spokes, was SE, whereas the the prevailing wind blows from the E. The chart at the bottom shows the same thing but without direction information. For example, swells larger than 1.5 feet (0.5m) coincided with good wind conditions 12% of the time, equivalent to 4 days. Open sea swells exceeding >3m (>10ft) are unlikely to arise in a normal December but 5% of the time you can expect swell in the range 1.3-2m (4-6.5ft) 5%, equivalent to (2 days). Taking into account the proportion of these swells that coincided with predicted offshore winds, and given the fact that Bar Beach is exposed to open water swells, we estimate that clean surf can be found at Bar Beach about 12% of the time and that surf is spoilt by onshore wind 65% of the time. This is means that we expect 23 days with waves in a typical December, of which 4 days should be surfable.

IMPORTANT: Beta version feature! Swell heights are open water values from NWW3. There is no attempt to model near-shore effects. Coastal wave heights will generally be less, especially if the break does not have unobstructed exposure to the open ocean.